


Wheel Within Wheel In Freedom Revolve

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [5]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Addiction, M/M, Quitting Smoking, Sex as a distraction, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 01:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12784434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: “Right,” Abdul said calmly; he came into the bathroom and put a hand on Thomas’s back, the other gently wiping back hair from Thomas’s damp forehead. “Molly,” he called, “a cup of ginger tea, please, to go with the promethazine.”“You are a horrible man,” Thomas said dully.





	Wheel Within Wheel In Freedom Revolve

*

They ambushed him with it, on a summer Friday in 1991.

Thomas really ought to have starting suspecting first thing in the morning, when he rose to find that the pipe he had laid by on a dresser in his room was missing. He caught Molly in the process of cleaning it – or so he thought, because it was a bit odd, how furtive and disappointed she looked about it – in the kitchen, reclaimed it, and went merrily on his way to the laboratory to refresh his memory on some sixth- and seventh-order forms that, by request of the Met, might be put to use putting criminals to sleep mid-heist upon triggering some of the more precious safes in London.

The pipe went missing again at lunch, in the bustle and clatter of Molly bringing in and then clearing his plate. But he wasn’t perturbed, not yet, because a gentleman always kept his options open when it came to the art of drinking smoke, and what he knew to be in the cigarette case in his jacket pocket would more than last him the remainder of the day.

Which is when he discovered the cigarette case was empty, and he started to wonder. And then Abdul arrived at the Folly at four, with an overnight bag on one shoulder and a medical bag on the other, and he realized he’d been betrayed.

“This is it, then?” he asked as Abdul, with a straightforwardly predatory look in his eyes, advanced into the house. “This weekend?”

“Indeed it is,” Abdul said cheerily, and then he turned to Molly. “All cleared out?”

She nodded.

“Traitor,” Thomas muttered, and Molly showed her teeth in a nasty, threatening grin.

They were working him in shifts, he realized that evening. Abdul had made frequent noises about getting Thomas to give up his – deeply-ingrained, deeply personal, deeply _gratifying_ habit, thank you very much – ever since they had met, but even so, he had to be impressed at the level of planning that had clearly gone into their operation. Over the course of several hours – during which he told himself (and told them, sternly and at length) that he would not give them the pleasure of seeing him lose any dignity over what would simply be another challenge among many he had faced – he found that they had seamlessly worked out some sort of silent, mysterious agreement and system between them by which he was never left alone. If Abdul got up from where they were sitting in the mundane library with a stack of eighteenth-century pamphlets on faerie sightings near Woolwich, Molly instantly glided in and stood like a sentry over him, scowling; if Thomas made any motion towards moving to another room, Abdul’s eyes followed him until he reached a doorway and then, snapping closed his book, he stood to follow.

It was more than enough to start feeling a tad irritable, even beyond what the nicotine withdrawal was doing.

“Go on then,” he’d said early on, pettily determined to make Abdul feel guilty over his actions. “What’ll be the worst of it?”

Walid, the cheeky bastard, had actually ticked off the anticipated symptoms on his fingers. “Cravings, tingling in the extremities, sweating, nausea, headaches, coughing, insomnia, anxiousness, irritability, and depression.”

He paused. “So, not much new there, then.”

“Don’t test me,” Thomas said darkly, pushing at the remnants of his dinner with his fork – the heavy suet of his pudding was unlikely to help with anything. “I know _you_ used to smoke.”

“I did,” Walid said, his eyebrows rising, “when I was young and stupid.”

“Not much new there, either,” Thomas bit back. “And how was ‘quitting’ for you?”

“Utterly miserable,” Abdul said, sounding deliberately pleasant, and reached over to push Thomas’s plate closer to him. “Eat up. You’ll need it.”

He made it until ten o’clock before he decided to abandon his newly distant idea of dignity and took to pacing back and forth across the sitting room to stop his legs from shaking. It was most unpleasant to be watched doing it, but Abdul, mercifully, turned his back after a moment or two and let Thomas wear his path into the carpet in peace, thinking longingly of the packet of shag he had kept until so recently in the drawer of his bedside table; of the faded wallpaper in the smoking room back in the days when he had been, briefly, a member of the Reform Club; of the smell of the packets of beedies he’d consumed in the thirties when they were fresh off the importing boat from India.

“What makes you think my health is even in danger?” he asked, in a last-ditch attempt to negotiate, as he and Walid were getting ready for bed around midnight (he had found himself blissfully alone in his room for all of ten seconds before Abdul came in, which unfortunately proved to be nowhere near enough time to determine whether his entire supply of pipe-tobacco had indeed been nicked). “For all you know, the reverse-aging may mean that my lungs are impervious to all of those side-effects you’ve been going on about.”

“They’re hardly _side-effects_ ,” Walid said, with the politely-disgruntled expression of someone who had been argued against by recalcitrant patients far too many times for his training or his ego to tolerate. “And I, for one, would rather we didn’t find out what the continued consumption of cancer-inducing chemicals does to you. Are we agreed on that point, at least?”

Damn. Abdul was much better at that guilting palaver.

The insomnia made itself felt at around two. Thankfully, insomnia was something he was practiced at putting up with. The craving, not so much. It was the most he could do to stay still within the strong clasp of Abdul’s sleeping arms and tell himself this too, as with all things, would pass, and that not going anywhere was certainly a preferable option to wandering about the house in the middle of the night with Molly, no doubt, ghosting in his footsteps.

His fidgeting woke Abdul around six, which was followed by a brief physical examination – Abdul’s touch was warm and reassuring, leaving goosebumps behind on Thomas’s chilled skin when he lifted away – and a breakfast which Thomas couldn’t taste. It was an appropriately grey morning as they walked around the Square, and Thomas couldn’t find it within himself to respond to Abdul’s nattering predictions that exercise would help sort him right out – and he was certainly not inclined to be cheerful when, upon their getting back into the Folly, the low-churning nausea that had been building in his stomach decided to make itself more forcefully felt, and sent him directly into the ground-floor bathroom to be sick into the toilet.

“Right,” Abdul said calmly; he came into the bathroom and put a hand on Thomas’s back, the other gently wiping back hair from Thomas’s damp forehead. “Molly,” he called, “a cup of ginger tea, please, to go with the promethazine.”

“You are a horrible man,” Thomas said dully.

“You’ve caught me, copper,” Abdul said gently, and pressed a kiss to Thomas’s temple. “Bed or sofa?”    

The speed of the onset of withdrawal, Abdul told him later, may have been a sign that the addiction was more severe than either of them might have realized. Thomas wasn’t so sure, when he looked back on it in retrospect – he had never consciously felt the pull of necessity around his cigarettes, nor had he ever maintained the volume of habit that would bankrupt him or make him unbearable to anyone around him (except for those pack-a-day times during and just after the war, which, at the time, had been not only excusable but entirely necessary). He came to think, eventually, that it was simply the knowledge, foisted on him, that he was to be cured which had brought it all on. Given a task and an achievable goal, his body had decided to get on with it, and with gusto.

At any rate, the second day was supposed to be the worst, and he couldn’t help but agree. The headache, fierce and throbbing, arrived at around noon on Saturday, and the depression at around three in the afternoon. Dignity, he thought to himself as he paged numbly through his latest book on the settee in the atrium, having not reacted to the blanket Abdul had put around his shoulders, nor to the calculating looks he was getting from both Abdul and Molly as they conferred in whispers and nods in the doorway to the kitchen. Dignity be damned – he was definitely miserable, and he was bloody well going to act like it.

“Tell me,” Abdul said, when evening was coming on again and he was sitting next to Thomas with an enormous issue of _The Lancet_ in his lap, and Thomas felt completely devoid of energy, not a conscious spark of magic left in him. “How are you feeling now?”

“Barren,” Thomas said, not knowing precisely what he meant by it.

“Well, that won’t do,” Abdul said; he let the journal close on his fingers but didn’t set it aside as he put his other hand on Thomas’s knee. “Why?”

“Not sure,” Thomas confessed. “What are you going to do with me afterwards? I might get bored, you know. I’ll have to take up crochet to keep my hands busy.”

He hardly sounded sensible even to himself, but thankfully Abdul took what he was trying to say in the spirit in which it was meant, and sidled closer. “You’re asking what hobbies you can take up instead?”

“Mm,” Thomas said, his breath hitching despite himself, mostly due to the fact that Abdul was close enough now to be leaving small, slow kisses on the side of his neck and jaw. “Something to take the edge off the temptation.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Abdul said breezily, very close into Thomas’s ear, and his hand slid further around Thomas’s thigh, the medical journal forgotten. “We can certainly have you knitting in no time, or I’m sure Molly would appreciate your help in the scullery – among other things.”

Thomas felt himself existing distressingly far away from the present moment as Abdul’s palm stroked over the front of his trousers, but, to his relief, if Abdul noticed, he didn’t let on. He just kept at it, slowly, murmuring things that Thomas was too tired to really comprehend, things along the lines of _You’re alright_ and _Just listen to me_ and _Relax, that’s it_ – until something crept back into him and clutched in his chest, and he groaned, turning his head to kiss Abdul properly.

He may still have been addled and half-addicted and thinking of cold winter nights on European fronts where the only thing you could be sure of was the taste of cheap, moldy tobacco shipped out from Blighty, but it was hard not to be swept along on the present tide that was the long minutes Abdul spent on his knees between Thomas’s legs, his arms over Thomas’s thighs keeping him still, his hands around Thomas’s waist and kneading deep into the tension in his lower back. He was rendered utterly helpless by it, swearing under his breath, digging shaking hands into Abdul’s hair as Abdul’s mouth went very thoroughly and familiarly about taking him apart.

“Abdul, _God_ ,” he moaned, and then his hands seized against Abdul’s scalp and his hips jerked upwards under Abdul’s grip, his breath shuddering.

Abdul, being young and therefore vulgar, had once spent an enlightening and disturbing afternoon teaching Thomas some of the more interesting slang his generation had come up with for acts performed upon someone else’s person. In this particular instance, Thomas found himself hazily thinking that yes – despite being anatomically impossible, the sucking of one’s brain out through one’s cock seemed a most helpful concept. He let out a long breath and carefully unclenched his hands, smoothing his palms along Abdul’s shoulders as Abdul withdrew, leisurely licking up the last of the evidence from Thomas’s tip before gently tucking him back into his underwear.

“There,” Abdul said, taking his seat again but not bothering to fix his hair or do much about the glint in his eye; he picked up his journal and flipped his way back to the page he had been reading, his lip pulling into a smile as he put his other hand back on Thomas’s knee. “How are you feeling now?”

Thomas considered the ceiling. “Post-coital.”

“You’ve never smoked a cigarette after bedding me,” Abdul laughed, slightly sarcastic, as if asking Thomas to _for heaven’s sake, do better than that_ – and it was, unexpectedly, the old-fashioned term which woke Thomas back up, making him feel ravenous and possessive.

He turned sideways, briskly grabbed at Abdul’s shirt, and pushed them both down full-length onto the settee, sending Abdul’s journal skidding to the floor.

“Hello,” Abdul grinned up at him, delightfully disheveled. “The return of the libido, right on schedule.”

“Oh, do shut up,” Thomas said testily, and, with a hand back in Abdul’s hair, pulled so the long arch of Abdul’s neck was laid bare to his mouth.

He was to do a lot more thinking, in future, about the pride he could take in being newly in _control_ over the smoking when it was something he had never realized had been controlling him. In that moment, though, all he really cared about was controlling this – how he still had enough about him to keep Abdul pinned, how Abdul pressed up into his hand when Thomas pulled open his jeans, about the unholy noises he made into Thomas’s shoulder as he came spilling over Thomas’s hand and Thomas rocked himself hard into the sticky groove of Abdul’s hip until he felt boneless and drifting, held fast by Abdul’s legs hooked around his knees.

“Better,” Abdul grinned, sounding lazily triumphant, and also very much like he was stating fact rather than asking a question.

“Much,” Thomas agreed, while drowsily thinking that Molly would murder them for what they had done to the cushions. Closing his eyes and ignoring the inevitable fallout seemed like a very good idea, and so he did.

He must have actually fallen asleep, because when he next opened his eyes he was in bed and in familiar darkness – how he had gotten there he couldn’t guess, though he suspected he wouldn’t have been much trouble to get up the stairs, so deep had been his stupor. His body had twitched him awake, but this time it was much easier for his mind to quieten it, and for him to turn over to curl against Abdul’s back, content to keep his face in the crook of a warm neck and wait for morning.

He felt sluggish when morning came, like parts of him were made of soft lead, but breakfast, at least, tasted like something again. Molly caught the brighter look on his face, and came as close as she ever did to beaming, the corners of her mouth turning prettily upwards as she fussed over pouring his coffee.

Abdul had one more distraction to remind him of, once Thomas had eaten and was growing restless again – this one was tamer, but no less re-orienting, as Abdul steered him down into the cellars and to the boxing room Thomas had had recently refurbished. Thomas was surprised to see Abdul taping his own hands up as well, though he had no gymnasium clothes – he was there, in the end, mostly to be a foil and to encourage Thomas to work his way around the ring, laughing as he ducked back from Thomas’s careful swings towards him. It felt good, Thomas realized, to lose himself in the blankness that was _this_ sort of physical exertion, the sort that could empty his mind and leave it quiet and content.

He was also past the point of thinking that he wanted to throw a couple of _impellos_ in Abdul’s direction for the sake of getting his own back, which had to indicate improvement.

“Well,” Thomas said, when he was finally exhausted and they had traipsed back up into the kitchen, where Molly had set places at the long wooden table for a restorative lunch. “I suppose that’s that, then. Are you satisfied with your work?”

Abdul considered him for a moment, a sort of frustration in his eyes. “I hope you didn’t think of this as something being inflicted upon you,” he began. “I won’t be angry, or surprised, if you relapse; the next few weeks and months will hardly be plain sailing. And I certainly wouldn’t begrudge you the social fag or two. It’s just – first steps. They’re important.”

“I know,” Thomas said, and found himself meaning it as he put a hand over Abdul’s on the tabletop. “Can you accept my apology for being so appalling?”

“You’re not required to offer one,” Abdul smiled, shaking his head. “But – yes. I can.”

“Good,” Thomas nodded. “By the way, Molly,” he added, as she came over from the stovetop with two steaming bowls of stew, “since I’m on the mend, perhaps we should instigate some other changes to our health in this house. A fresh menu and a real exercise regime. What do you say to that?”

Molly looked daggers at Abdul, who stared solemnly back.

“I’m so sorry,” Abdul said. “I think we’ve created a monster.”

 _Serves us all right_ , Thomas thought, diligently remembering to include himself in the guilty parties, and turned with newfound appetite to his meal.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from William Blake's _Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion_ (1804-20). Thanks for reading! Next up will be the conclusion(!) of the "The Faceless Man is a Ginormous Dick" arc....


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